Emergence
Emergence is, broadly speaking, the fact that there are features of the world—objects, properties, laws, perhaps other things—that are manifested as a result of the existence of other, usually more basic, entities but that cannot be completely reduced to those other entities. Theories of emergence tend to fall into two basic types: ontological emergence and epistemological emergence—with conceptual emergence serving as a subcategory of the latter. Advocates of ontological emergence consider emergent phenomena to be objective features of the world, their emergent status being independent of human existence and knowledge; advocates of epistemological emergence consider emergent features to be a result of the limited abilities of people to predict, to calculate, to observe, and to explain; and advocates of conceptual emergence consider emergent features to be a product of theoretical and linguistic representations of the world.
Emergence has considerable philosophical importance because the existence of certain kinds of ontologically emergent entities would provide direct evidence against the universal applicability of the generative atomism that has dominated Anglo-American philosophy in the last century. By generative atomism is meant the view that there exist atomic entities, be they physical, linguistic, logical, or some other kind, and all else is composed of those atoms according to rules of combination and relations of determination.
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